The Petunia Carnage

The book ‚The Petunia Carnage‘ is based on the true story of orange petunias, when the investigations of a Finnish scientist revealed that orange petunias are transgenic. The book goes back to the origins of the orange petunias at a controversial 1990’s landmark experiment at Max Planck Institute in Cologne, followed by their mysterious ‚escape from the lab‘. Finally, it explains why the orange petunias were regarded as ‚illegal‘ after they had been bred and sold without permit for more than 25 years, leading to their worldwide mass destruction in 2017.

In the official guidance of the US Department of Agriculture, one permissible method of destruction was incinerating. When designing the book cover, we picked up on this by laser-burning the title into the cloth.

Client: Klaus Pichler
Photos: Klaus Pichler